September 11 2001

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      in Elections

      Battlefield Commander’s Case Goes to Guantánamo Jury

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      The panel is deciding a sentence for a prisoner who pleaded guilty to commanding Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan that carried out war crimes.A military jury on Wednesday began deliberating a sentence for an admitted war criminal at Guantánamo Bay after prosecution and defense lawyers portrayed the prisoner as, alternately, a senior member of a global Qaeda conspiracy or a battlefield commander defending Afghanistan from the U.S. invasion.Many of the U.S. officers serving on the 11-member panel are themselves veterans of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How they view the crimes of the man called Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi could influence the length of his sentence, and whether they heed his lawyer’s request to recommend clemency.The closing arguments focused on the battlefield in wartime Afghanistan, in contrast to the court’s better known cases, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000, which are portrayed as acts of terrorism.Mr. Hadi, 63, who was captured in 2006, pleaded guilty in 2022. Under the terms of his agreement, he is to receive a sentence in the 25- to 30-year range. But he could be released to the custody of a trusted country, if one can be found that will give him specialized care for a paralyzing spine disease that has left him disabled.Douglas J. Short, the lead prosecutor, called Mr. Hadi a “senior member of one of the most notorious conspiracies to date, Al Qaeda,” who joined the movement before the Sept. 11 attacks and did not give up the fight when the United States invaded. Mr. Short said that Mr. Hadi put civilians in harm’s way in a campaign of suicide bombings and other operations in the early 2000s in Afghanistan, when the United States was pursuing a “hearts and minds” strategy.He offered a timeline of the deaths of 17 U.S. and foreign coalition soldiers in 2003 and 2004. They were war crimes, he said, because the Taliban and Qaeda forces who carried them out blended in with the civilian population and used unorthodox methods of warfare, such as turning civilian taxis into bombs by packing them with explosives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      War Crimes Hearing Gives Public Virtual Look Inside a Secret C.I.A. Prison

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      Years after the agency’s “black site” program was shut down, details are slowly emerging during trials at Guantánamo Bay.The public on Monday got its first view of a C.I.A. “black site,” including a windowless, closet-size cell where a former Qaeda commander was held during what he described as the most humiliating experience of his time in U.S. custody.The former commander, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, led the 360-degree virtual tour of the site, Quiet Room 4, during a sentencing hearing at Guantánamo Bay that began last week. He described being blindfolded, stripped, forcibly shaved and photographed naked on two occasions after his capture in 2006.He never saw the sun, nor heard the voices of his guards, who were dressed entirely in black, including their masks.Mr. Hadi, 63, was one of the last prisoners to be held in the overseas black site network where the George W. Bush administration held and interrogated about 100 terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Even now, years after the Obama administration shut the program down, its secrets remain. But the details are slowly emerging at the national security trials of former prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.In court on Monday, spectators saw Quiet Room 4, a 6-foot-square empty chamber, which Mr. Hadi said resembled the place he was held for three months — minus a bloodstain that was on the wall of his cell then.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jury in Federal Lawsuit Deadlocks on Abu Ghraib Torture Allegations

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      Three Iraqi men sued a Virginia contractor that supplied interrogators to the U.S. military after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.A federal jury in Virginia said on Thursday that it was unable to reach a verdict in a lawsuit filed by three Iraqi men who said they were tortured while being held by the United States at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison two decades ago.The jurors had deliberated for almost eight days, and with the panel still deadlocked the judge in the case, Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, declared a mistrial on Thursday.The three plaintiffs had sued a defense contractor, CACI Premier Technology, asserting that CACI employees working as interrogators at the prison directed U.S. military guards to abuse the men in an effort to “soften” them up.The testimony of the three men last month was the first time a civilian jury had heard allegations of post-9/11 abuses directly from detainees.In a handwritten note to the judge on Thursday, the jury foreman wrote that the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict, largely because of differing interpretations of the evidence and of a legal defense known as the “borrowed servant” doctrine, where CACI could avoid liability by proving that its employees were under government control.The mistrial means that the lawsuit, filed in 2008, can continue, if the plaintiffs seek another trial and the court agrees.The plaintiffs were represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a human rights organization, and Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, a law firm in New York.Baher Azmy, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the plaintiffs’ legal team would “pursue our right to a retrial.”J. William Koegel Jr., CACI’s general counsel, did not respond to a request for comment.In 2013, another contractor that had employees at Abu Ghraib settled a similar case by agreeing to pay $5 million.The trial in the lawsuit came 20 years after the abuse at Abu Ghraib was exposed.Marco Di Lauro/Getty ImagesFor more than a decade, CACI sought to have the case against it dismissed, filing a host of motions and appeals challenging the viability of the plaintiffs’ claims. In particular, CACI sought immunity from claims filed under the Alien Tort Statute, which permits foreign citizens to seek damages in federal court for violations of international law.In 2013 and again in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the statute’s scope, requiring that the conduct at issue be closely tied to the United States. CACI invoked those decisions to argue that the three Iraqi men’s lawsuit should be thrown out, but Judge Brinkema ruled that the case could proceed.During five days of testimony, the jury heard the three plaintiffs, now middle age, describe their treatment in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib.One plaintiff, Salah Al-Ejaili, said he was shackled naked in a painful stress position, kept that way overnight and ordered to wipe up his own vomit the next morning. Asa’ad Al-Zuba’e said he was forced to crawl on his stomach down a hallway with a bag over his head, until his legs bled. Suhail Al Shimari said he was threatened with rape and death.“I had no control over what was happening to me, or what would happen to me,” Mr. Al-Ejaili said.The jury also heard testimony from two retired Army generals who had investigated Abu Ghraib. A report by one of them, Gen. Antonio Taguba, found that one of CACI’s civilian interrogators “made a false statement” and “clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse” that was carried out by U.S. military police.The trial in the lawsuit came 20 years after the abuse at Abu Ghraib was exposed, with the publication of photos taken by Abu Ghraib guards showing military police pulling a detainee by a leash, posing beside a pyramid of naked detainees and giving a thumbs-up sign beside an ice-packed corpse.The photos were followed by revelations that senior Bush administration officials had authorized brutal “enhanced interrogation techniques” after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the military characterized the Abu Ghraib abuses as the misconduct of a few bad apples. Fewer than a dozen enlisted soldiers were convicted in courts-martial and sentenced to military prison.“Everyone knew it was wrong,” said Charles A. Graner, one of the convicted soldiers who was often described as the “ringleader” of the troops committing abuses at the time. “And no one was willing to step up and stop it.”The defendant, a subsidiary of CACI International, based in Virginia, has denied wrongdoing. None of the most damning images from Abu Ghraib show CACI contractors engaging in misconduct.The civil trial in federal court in Virginia marked the first time a civilian jury had heard allegations directly from detainees.Shuran Huang for The New York Times More

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      Sept. 11 Trial Plea Negotiations Still Underway at Guantánamo Bay

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      The lead prosecutor briefed the judge on the talks in an effort to fend off a claim that members of Congress had unlawfully meddled in the negotiations.Prosecutors and defense lawyers are still negotiating toward a plea agreement for the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks despite the Biden administration’s refusal to endorse certain proposed conditions, the lead prosecutor said in court on Wednesday at Guantánamo Bay.“This is all whirling around us,” said Clayton G. Trivett Jr., the prosecutor, discussing key details of the negotiations in open court for the first time. He added that “around the edges we have agreed to do things” and that “the positions that we took at the time are still available.”In mostly secret negotiations in 2022 and 2023, prosecutors offered to drop the death penalty from the case in exchange for detailed admissions by the accused architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and four other men who are charged as his accomplices in the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people. Since then, one of the five men has been ruled not mentally competent to stand trial.The occasion of the briefing was a legal filing by lawyers for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the defendants and Mr. Mohammed’s nephew, asking the judge to dismiss the case or at least the possibility of a death penalty because of real or apparent political interference by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and other members of Congress last summer.In August 2023, those members of Congress began urging relatives of Sept. 11 victims on social media to pressure President Biden to derail any deal that would prevent capital punishment.At the time, the White House was deciding whether to endorse certain conditions sought through the talks, most related to addressing the physical and psychological damage the men had from torture in their early years of incommunicado custody by the C.I.A.On Sept. 6, 2023, the White House declined to get involved.Rita J. Radostitz, a lawyer for Mr. Baluchi, said that Mr. Cruz then took “a victory lap.”“The Biden administration was prepared to give them a plea deal,” Mr. Cruz posted on social media. He went on, using the acronym for the Defense Department, “After I pressed the DoD, they reversed course & rejected the plea deal. Big win for justice.”But both defense and prosecution lawyers told the judge on Wednesday that the White House position did not derail the talks.When Mr. Cruz got involved, defense lawyers were “working with the prosecution streamlining all the litigation to present, in an open setting, a full examination of the events of 9/11 and answer all the victim family members’ questions about what happened,” said Gary D. Sowards, Mr. Mohammed’s lawyer.Any deal would take the death penalty off the table and require a mini-trial and airing of the facts of the attack, he said.The defendants want guarantees of trauma care for head injuries, gastrointestinal damage and mental illnesses blamed on their C.I.A. detention; to continue to eat and pray together communally, rather than be held in solitary confinement; and to get better communication with their families rather than recorded video calls. But Mr. Trivett said those demands, called “policy principles,” require infrastructure, funding and executive branch approval. So he forwarded them to the general counsel of the Defense Department while his team secretly negotiated how a plea agreement would play out in the Guantánamo court.He said Congress had legitimate interests in that aspect of the negotiations, because some assurances would require funding — and Congress decides the Pentagon’s budget.Mr. Sowards said a negotiated settlement at Guantánamo would not resemble one in federal court, where a defendant comes to plead guilty and is sentenced without a trial.These negotiations between prosecution and defense lawyers were working toward a lengthy, open court process that would involve a detailed plea, presentation of the crime, testimony by victims and possibly an opportunity for family members to have the defendants answer their questions, Mr. Sowards said.In military commissions, that process can last months.Mr. Trivett told the judge that about 20,000 people can be counted as relatives of the victims of the attacks, and there was no agreement “on what is justice in this case, what is an appropriate punishment.” He made the presentation on a rare week when only one relative was watching in the spectators’ gallery.“I’m glad to hear they’re still talking, and that there’s an openness to bringing a plausible resolution that will give some sort of finality to everyone involved,” said Colleen Kelly, whose brother Bill was killed at the World Trade Center.By “everyone,” she said, she meant the Sept. 11 families, the prosecution and the defense lawyers, some who have been shouldering this responsibility for two decades. Ms. Kelly, a founder of the Sept. 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows movement, came to Guantánamo on Saturday to watch a week of hearings as a court-approved “nongovernmental observer.”This is the third week of a five-week pretrial hearing session, and as it happened, the prosecutors sponsored no family members as guest observers.Last month, when family members were watching the proceedings, another prosecutor told the judge that, regardless of the outcome of their trial, Mr. Mohammed and the others could be held forever in a form of preventive detention.In disclosing the details of the continuing talks, Mr. Trivett said there had been no unlawful influence on his team. “Nobody has threatened me,” he said, adding that he was under no pressure “not to negotiate consistent with what we consider to be a just result.”On Wednesday, Darin Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Cruz, said the senator would continue his efforts.“During his time in the Senate, Senator Cruz has led efforts to combat terrorists, from the Iran-controlled Houthis to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to Hamas, in addition to advocating against plea deals for terrorists being charged for plotting and planning 9/11. He will continue to do so,” Mr. Miller said. More

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      Judge in Sept. 11 Case Visits Former C.I.A. Black Site

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      Col. Matthew McCall toured the part of the prison at Guantánamo Bay where, in 2007, federal agents obtained now-disputed confessions from terrorism suspects.In a first, a military judge at Guantánamo Bay on Friday crossed into the security zone containing the wartime prison and inspected a former C.I.A. “black site” facility at the center of a dispute over the taint of torture in the Sept. 11, 2001, case.It was a noteworthy moment in the arc of the two-decade history of the Guantánamo trials. No war court judge had before made the five-mile trip to look at the detention operations, where the military maintains the only known, still-intact remnant of the network of overseas prisons that the C.I.A. operated from 2002 to 2009.But Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge, is edging toward a decision on whether the accused mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and three co-defendants voluntarily confessed to conspiring in the attacks in their fourth year of detention, under questioning by F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo prison.And the prison site he visited, called Camp Echo, has played a central but covert role in the case. From 2003 to 2004, the C.I.A. kept five prized prisoners there, near the prison facilities but out of reach of the International Red Cross. It was part of its secret overseas network that hid about 120 “high-value detainees” in such far-flung sites as Afghanistan, Thailand and Poland.In April 2004, the agency closed the black site at Guantánamo and moved those five prisoners to other secret sites, on the advice of the Justice Department, to avoid a looming U.S. Supreme Court decision later that year that granted detainees at U.S.-controlled Guantánamo Bay access to lawyers.After President George W. Bush ordered Mr. Mohammed and 13 other C.I.A. prisoners be moved to Guantánamo in September 2006 to face trial, federal agents used the same portion of Camp Echo to obtain ostensibly lawful confessions by what the prosecutors called “clean teams.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Bob Graham, former US senator and Florida governor who opposed Iraq war, dies at 87

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      Former US senator and two-term Florida governor Bob Graham, who gained national prominence as chairman of the Senate intelligence committee in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks and as an early critic of the Iraq war, has died aged 87.Graham’s family announced the death in a statement posted on X by his daughter Gwen Graham on Tuesday.“We are deeply saddened to report the passing of a visionary leader, dedicated public servant, and even more importantly, a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather,” the family’s statement said.Graham, who served three terms in the Senate, made an unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, emphasising his opposition to the Iraq invasion.But his bid was delayed by heart surgery in January 2003, and he was never able to gain enough traction with voters to catch up, bowing out that October. He didn’t seek reelection in 2004 and was replaced by Republican Mel Martinez.Graham was a man of many quirks. He perfected the “workdays” political gimmick of spending a day doing various jobs from horse stall mucker to FBI agent and kept a meticulous diary, noting almost everyone he spoke with, everything he ate, the TV shows he watched and even his golf scores.Graham said the notebooks were a working tool for him and he was reluctant to describe his emotions or personal feelings in them. “I review them for calls to be made, memos to be dictated, meetings I want to follow up on and things people promise to do,” he said.Graham was among the earliest opponents of the Iraq war, saying President George W Bush distorted intelligence data and argued it was more serious than the sexual misconduct issues that led the House to impeach President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. It led Graham to launch his short, abortive presidential bid.“The quagmire in Iraq is a distraction that the Bush administration, and the Bush administration alone, has created,” Graham said in 2003.During his 18 years in Washington, Graham worked well with colleagues from both parties, particularly Florida Republican Connie Mack during their dozen years together in the Senate.As a politician, few were better. Florida voters hardly considered him the wealthy, Harvard-educated attorney that he was.Graham’s political career spanned five decades, beginning with his election to the Florida House of Representatives in 1966. He won a state Senate seat in 1970 and then was elected governor in 1978. He was re-elected in 1982. Four years later, he won the first of three terms in the US Senate when he ousted incumbent Republican Paula Hawkins.View image in fullscreenGraham remained widely popular with Florida voters, winning reelection by wide margins in 1992 and 1998 when he carried 63 of 67 counties. In that latter election, he defeated Charlie Crist, who later served as a Republican governor from 2007 to 2011. Crist said on Tuesday that he came to “love him for the good, decent man that he was”.House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi called Graham “a patriotic American” who “brought his love for his family and for his state of Florida to the Senate, where he served with immense dignity and courage”.Daniel Robert Graham was born 9 November 1936 in Coral Gables, where his father, Ernest “Cap” Graham, had moved from South Dakota and established a large dairy operation. Young Bob milked cows, built fences and scooped manure as a teenager. One of his half-brothers, Phillip Graham, was publisher of the Washington Post and Newsweek until he took his own life in 1963, just a year after Bob Graham’s graduation from Harvard law.In 1966 he was elected to the Florida legislature, where he focused largely on education and health care issues. He got off to a shaky start and was dubbed “Governor Jello” for some early indecisiveness, but he shook that label through his handling of several serious crises.As governor he also signed numerous death warrants, founded the Save the Manatee Club with entertainer Jimmy Buffett and led efforts to establish several environmental programs. Graham was also known for his 408 “workdays”, including stints as a housewife, boxing ring announcer, flight attendant and arson investigator. They grew out of a teaching stint as a member of the Florida Senate’s education committee and then morphed into the campaign gimmick that helped him relate to the average voter.“This has been a very important part of my development as a public official, my learning at a very human level what the people of Florida expect, what they want, what their aspirations are and then trying to interpret that and make it policy that will improve their lives,” Graham said in 2004 as he completed his final job as a Christmas gift wrapper.After leaving public life in 2005, Graham spent much of his time at a public policy centre named after him at the University of Florida and pushing the legislature to require more civics classes in the state’s public schools.Graham was one of five members selected for an independent commission by President Barack Obama in June 2010 to investigate a huge BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that threatened sea life and beaches along several south-eastern Gulf states. 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      U.S.S. Cole Case Judge Sets Goal of 2025 Trial

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      The NewsAn Army judge who was in law school at the time of the U.S.S. Cole bombing restarted hearings in the case on Monday and declared it was his intention to put the accused mastermind of the attack on trial at Guantánamo Bay in 2025. If he does, the trial would start a quarter century after the terrorist attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors off Aden, Yemen.“I think it’s important to set benchmarks,” said Col. Matthew S. Fitzgerald, adding that he expected to serve as a military judge through 2026. He replaced the third judge to preside in the case at Guantánamo, Lanny J. Acosta Jr., who held his last hearing in the case in June.The destroyer Cole, at port in Aden, Yemen, after it was heavily damaged in an attack in 2000.Dimitri Messinis/Associated PressWhy It Matters: Families are waitingIt has been a long wait for survivors of the attack and relatives of the sailors who were killed. A Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, has been in U.S. custody since 2002 and was first charged in 2011, making his the longest-running capital case at Guantánamo Bay.Paul Abney, a senior sailor on the ship, called the judge’s announcement “delightful words to hear.” He was in court on Monday for the hearings and has traveled to Guantánamo about 10 times since 2012 to watch the legal wranglings.“Even if it doesn’t happen next year, the fact that he’s willing to put a target date down, and make it a goal to shoot for is, I think, inspiring,” said Mr. Abney, a retired Navy master chief.What’s Next: More hearingsColonel Fitzgerald has 14 more weeks of hearings on the 2024 calendar. Pretrial matters yet to be tackled include the admissibility of some evidence, proposed witnesses, whether Mr. Nashiri can be tried by a military commission, how to seat a panel of military officers and whether Mr. Nashiri would be entitled to administrative credit if he is convicted but not sentenced to death.Even before court began, the judge issued an order with deadlines for both sides to prepare for trial. The timetable orders lawyers for Mr. Nashiri to provide prosecutors with a list of witnesses they would want to call to testify at the trial by Jan. 9.Facts to Keep in Mind: An appeal loomsThe judge announced the goal in his first hour on the bench. But he made no mention of a government effort to get an appellate panel to overturn a decision by his predecessor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When Richard Serra’s Steel Curves Became a Memorial

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      The sculptor had a breakthrough in the late 1990s with his torqued metal rings. Then the attack on the World Trade Center, which Serra witnessed, gave them a sudden new significance.After the yelling, the hearings, the lawsuit, the dismantlement, Richard Serra entered the last decade of the last century with his mind cast toward the classics.He was happy to see the end of the ’80s. The American sculptor, who died Tuesday at 85, got caught up in the Reagan-era culture wars with “Tilted Arc,” a 120-foot plate of curved Cor-Ten steel that sliced across Manhattan’s Federal Plaza. It drew outrage almost as soon as it was installed in 1981. His fellow New Yorkers shouted at him on the street. People called his loft on Duane Street with death threats. (This newspaper, too, was not always kind.) The work was finally removed — in Serra’s estimation, destroyed — in March 1989. You could see the appeal of a trip to Italy.In Rome, he visited San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: a chapel designed by Francesco Borromini that’s one of the prizes of Baroque architecture, topped by an oval dome. “The central space is simply a regular ellipse, and the walls that surround it are vertical,” he would later recall. “I walked in and thought: what if I turn this form on itself?”Serra’s “Tilted Arc” (1981), in Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. After a yearslong battle it was dismantled in 1989.Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo by Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesBack in New York, after consulting with engineers and trying out new computer-aided design software, he created a sculptural form that had not existed before: free-standing plates of weatherproof steel whose top and bottom edges form two identical, misaligned ellipses. The rolled steel weighed some 20 tons, but had a finesse that belied their mass. They had the can-you-top-this confidence of an artist who saw Borromini as his peer, but they were more inviting than Serra’s previous steel works, beckoning you to explore their warmly patinated expanses.The torqued ellipses, quite literally, shifted the axis of Serra’s career: from solid to space, from process to perception, from the artist’s actions to the viewer’s bodily experience. Their enclosing volumes provided this once controversial, always gruff artist an unexpectedly congenial third act; the ellipses at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, N.Y., have become a reliable venue for second dates, an ideal backdrop for cultured flirtation. Whereas for me the ellipses have remained these past decades something more like empty tombs, wedded in my mind to another site of deformed steel, and to the life of an artist who experienced Sept. 11, 2001, with horrible immediacy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More